Superman
by Darksknight
Summary: Watch me unfold. Watch me burn like you were supposed to. (Ichigo-centric, placed after winter war. Chapter 2; Orihime-centric. Not IchiHime)
1. Searching for Superman

Will there come a time when I don't want to write no-powers Ichigo? Hell no. Will there come a time when I'm not upset about Kubo acting like the winter war had no effect on our favorite fantastic human four? Hell fucking no!

Quick warnings for this chapter- mentions/descriptions of panic attacks, nudity?, depression, brief mentions of suicide though it never actually happens, and then, because it's bleach, violence. (This is currently un-beta'd. I'll go through it soon.)

Thanks! Please enjoy!

-O-

They're supposed to be writing coming-of-age essays. Yeah fucking right- he never had time to come of age, so to speak. The world grabbed him by his neck and said, "Grow. Now."

This topic, though, is something he's familiar with. The teacher is having them write about frustration, and if he knows one thing in his life, it's that. She says to write about petty things- the frustration of not having enough time to have fun, of having to find work, the frustration of a parent not letting go. He's been there, done that. He had his work, he had his fun, he had his parent. Now there's nothing left of it all- not even his father. His father is still there, but it's different now. It's more like two people living in the same house than a father-son relationship now more than ever before. Not to say they haven't tried.

Kurosaki Ichigo. Seventeen. Ex-substitute soul reaper.

Some idiot in the desk over moans about ex's. Oh, he moans, and drags out long stories about finding things left behind- oh he's so broken hearted! Ichigo has the one big fat Ex himself, but he had that stripped from him. They hadn't wanted him to go, and he hadn't wanted to go either. All in all, it was more like death than a bad break up. Separation, maybe. He wasn't sure how to describe it.

Yeah, sure, your ex makes it awkward. You don't want to go to your buddy's house for a sleepover because he's doing her now- whatever. He can't spend the night with anyone now. It's always something- the nightmares, the knee-jerk reaction when someone touches him in his sleep, the way he just can't sleep because he's not tired yet. He's not awake, he's not sleepy, he's exhausted- he's nothing.

His "ex" leaves nothing in its wake.

That's frustration. It's bitterness, too, which is something that he finds can come hand in hand with the former emotion. There's more to it, though. It goes a lot deeper than big ex's and the 'I-never-got-to-be-a-kid' pain. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if it were just that.

He can't stand the way they stare. In the gym locker room, they look at his back and torso and just watch as he moves, wondering- silent. No one has the courage to ask. The staff hears of the rumors and the teacher asks him once, _What are the scars from?_

War. So much war. War where he saved a woman from an unjust death, war where he fought his own, war where he raised a blade against hollows, and _the_ war. The war where he lost it all.

_Don't touch me._

He's a modern-day martyr, burnt up at the stake. They don't know that they had their lives on the line, or that he's what's stood between them and death so many times. They just don't know. They think he's another dumb punk kid.

That's how its always been, yeah, but now it's worse. No one is there to make it better. The work doesn't distract him because it's gone. It would be so satisfying to have come back from the war with his sword still intact, so that even though they didn't know about it, the hollows he'd fight in days to come would. He's just as helpless as them, now. Can't even see a ghost.

This isn't his world.

"I feel like I've been sent to an alternate dimension." He tells her. She can't hear him- she's probably doing paperwork in Soul Society. He wonders if she's eaten lately- she's always been too obsessed with getting things done and not careful enough about herself. "It's- fuck. It's so damn _annoying_. I wanna go home, Rukia. I just want to go home."

But he is home, and he's never felt so homesick in his entire life.

_Watch me unfold,_ He thinks. _Watch me burn like you were supposed to._

The empty air holds no reply for his thoughts of his words. His desperate please and confessions are met by nothing but silence.

-O-

He doesn't like the way clothes feel anymore. They're too oddly bound about him. He likes being a spirit outside of his own body, with clothes that are made of the atmosphere- clothes that fit his body exactly. He lounges in his underwear alone up in his room on the weekends and thinks about going out, but it's too much of a pain. He'll do push-ups until he can't move anymore, and when he hits that point he'll do sit-ups instead. The scar across his chest and stomach slides uneasily with the rest of his skin, lighting up with tiny sparks of phantom pain.

_Good._ He thinks. The pain lets him know he's alive.

Until it doesn't.

"So that brings us to the re-establishment of Hong Kong," The teacher says. "China took repossession of it in…" She turns. "Kurosaki, are you okay?"

He's not okay. He's bent over his desk and drenched with sweat, hand pressed hard to his chest. _It's gone._ He tells himself. _The hole is gone, get a grip!_ But he can feel it there, the edges crisp with the burn from Ulquiorra's cero. He can't breath with that huge hole punched through him. He can feel his hollow bubbling up his throat with liquefied white bone, ready to take him over.

"Kurosaki?"

_It's not real!_ He screams at himself. _It's over! It's over now!_

It is over, isn't it? He wonders what he's going to do with his life now.

"Kurosaki?"

Ishida stands and quickly makes his way over to Ichigo's side, sliding under his arm to help him stand. Ichigo still can't breath, but he awkwardly hobbles out of the room with the quincy as his crutch and anchor to the real world. No one tries to stop them from leaving.

"It happens to me, too." Ishida says quietly. "Sometimes I can't move my hand. That espada wasn't messing around, was he?"

"No." He says, grim. "And neither was my hollow when it killed him."

Ishida's good hand flinches, heading towards his stomach before he can stop the motion. He knows Ichigo sees, but tries to cover up the motion by rubbing at his neck anyway. "Yeah…"

_I'm seventeen._ Ichigo thinks. _Way too young to be having my mid-life crisis._

_You're right._ That voice- so much like his hollow- replies. _It's not a mid-life crisis. This is just the feeling of your life ending._

How can he argue with that?

-O-

It's odd to him that Karin is one of the only people in the entire world who seems to understand. She answers the door on the weekends and tells his friends that he's out, or that he's busy, or that he's in trouble again. She lets him know they've stopped by and that she turned them away, even though he'd never asked her to make excuses for him. She just knows that he can't be with other people the way he is. He needs time to rebuild himself, if possible.

She knows he doesn't like the way his clothes feel, so she'll sit out in the hall with her back to the door and talk while he makes himself sick doing crunches.

"They're all getting annoyed with me." She says flatly. "I kind of want to play a big prank on all of them and convince them that you've moved out. But then, I don't want them climbing up through your window looking for you like the old man used to."

He doesn't reply, but she knows he agrees with him, somehow.

"… Everyone keeps saying you're going to have to come out of your room and deal with the world at some point." She says. "But I don't see the problem with staying in there. Everyone else in the world is an idiot."

He almost smiles at that. Almost.

"She'd agree with that one, don't you think?"

The smile fades. He's not upset with her for bringing _that_ up. He likes that she's not afraid to, and it keeps him sane to hear someone else talk about Rukia. If it wasn't for Karin, he might have begun to think he'd gone crazy- that the shinigami girl had never existed at all.

"She never really loved anyone like she loved you."

_I never really loved anyone like I loved her._

"She'll come back." Karin whispers. "You'll see."

Finally, he speaks. He's done with the exercise. He'd been up all night, and now it's time for a nap that will last until dinnertime. "Don't count on it." He climbs into bed and is glad that she doesn't reply. They both know she'll try again in another day.

He wonders when his apatite will come back as he drifts to sleep.

-O-

It's not just that Rukia's gone. Even if she were there, at that very moment, he wouldn't be able to see her. And even though he knows she can take care of herself, and that she's strong, and that she doesn't _need_ him he knows that if something were to happen to her, he wouldn't be able to do a thing. If right now, this very moment, she was once again put on the execution block- even if he could _see_ her there- he'd have to sit still and do nothing.

Powerless. It's the second shittiest feeling in the whole world- coming directly in place behind that damn homesickness he feels for a life that's not his anymore.

It doesn't make sense to wish things had gone different. If he hadn't lost his powers Aizen would have won, and then he would have died- Rukia, too, and Renji, and his sisters, and dad, and Chad, and Ishida, and Inoue … all of them. His powers were worth less than one of those lives, never mind all of them scaled in together.

And yet he still wonders what else could have been done. Why it had to be _him_ the not-even-real-death-god human brat that had mattered as much to Soul Society as loose change once. Something inside of his has died, and they're all about death, aren't they? So why don't they take charge?

During the night it's so quiet. Too quiet. All he can hear is his breath; in, out, in, out, and the stutter in between when he starts to speed up without meaning to. The soft sound of his breathing evening out before it starts up quick again… and then silence.

His hollow used to talk to him in times like these. Back then he found it unnerving; that off-kilter voice tittering on about what _he_ would have done during the day. He talked about how he wouldn't have let that kid's comment slide, and about how he would have jumped out of the window, what he would have done on the way home, this and that. Ichigo would argue back, tiredly, that they couldn't do that, they'd get in trouble, blah-blah-blah… But it was something to do when he couldn't sleep.

Now his mind is consumed by thoughts of what his hollow would have done, what he would have said he would have done- dumb things like that. He wonders if his hollow is dead now that there's not place for that kind of power in his body. He thinks about the landscape of his mind, with all the tilted buildings. He wonders if it flooded. Do hollows need air to breath? His certainly must have drowned- he can't see it being quiet any other way.

_Hey…_ He tries. _You there?_

He feels stupid all over again. Of course he's not there. And if he had been, he wouldn't have answered out of spite, too. The Hollow would have saved that silent call for later, so that when Ichigo was saying he didn't want him around he could say something about how that's not the way it was so many days ago or whatever.

He wants to know for sure. The only bait big enough to lure his hollow out, though, is his body. And even though he knows the hollow is gone, he can't make himself shout that it can take control in his mind. Old habits die hard.

Wouldn't that be something, though? His big reunion with Soul Society, all because he'd been stupid enough to give in to his hollow. He wonders, to himself in the silence- which is still very oppressing- if they'd kill him or what. It seems like everything he's done before now doesn't matter anymore. Like he said- that part of his life is over.

No matter how badly he wants it not to be.

-O-

Some days it's almost too much. Life is so horribly stale and mundane and he just wants to scream. _I lived! I don't belong here! Don't you people know what I've done?!_ He has bigger things to worry about than some stupid test- he has bad guys to kill and people to save.

He hates the popular American comic Superman. He hates how Clark Kent is the disguise, and Superman is the real deal. He hates it because that's how he used to be.

_How would Clark Kent react if Superman died?_

Orihime smiles with a sort of gentle malice he's noticed has barely grown on her during her time in Hueco Mundo. Kindly, and softly, she says, "I think he'd jump off a building." A beat goes by and she realizes what she says, sadly staring at the ground. "Not… not necessarily to kill himself. He'd do it to see if he could fly."

That one makes sense.

Somehow, though, it doesn't come out as the explanation he wants it to be when his father is patching up his shredded knuckles. He wants to say he'd forgotten what it felt like to have human strength- that he'd hit the wall thinking the debris would distract the gang in their fight while he took out the front, that it was what he always used to do with the hollows. But it doesn't sound right, no matter how he twists it in his head, until what Inoue says comes back into mind.

"Why?" His father asks. He does not demand an answer. He just wants to know.

"Because," Ichigo answers, and like Orihime, does not think through what it will sound like outside of his head when he says, "You know. It's… just. If Superman died and it was just Clark Kent, he'd jump off a building."

His father pauses.

"… Shit." Ichigo curses and tries to back-peddle. "Shit. No, that's not-"

"Just remember, son." Isshin says quietly. "You were a brother, a son, and a friend long before you were a hero, and we loved you all just as much then."

He can't find anything to say to that. Because that's not the point. He knows they all love him just as much as they did before. The thing is, he doesn't love himself like he did when he was a Soul Reaper. He doesn't love living like he did back then.

He's the one who has to live this way. Not them.

-O-

He gets into a fight in the middle of class one day. The kid has it coming. He's been creeping all over Orihime since day one, despite Ishida blocking him off and taking place as Orihime's shield time and time again. Even Chad, who is strong and imposing if anyone ever was, can't seem to stop the idiot in his tracks. Orihime was sadly used to the sexual harassment, and she takes it all in stride and managed to get through with Tatsuki's revenge, but this is different. The boy grabs her while she's stuck in a daydream about that past- one clammy palm tightening like claws around her arm.

She panics. She lets out a high scream and crumbled on the ground, hands over her head, trembling. "I'm sorry!" She yells. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" She chokes and presses her head into her knees harder, crying but pretending she's okay.

His first thought when these sorts of things used to happen was _what did they do to her?_ Now, however, it's a simple reality they all must live with. Ishida and Chad rush to be her support, Ishida with words and Chad with his warm torso and soft hands. The rest of the class watches on, all with wide eyes.

Usually when someone touches Inoue, it is Tatsuki who stands to pass judgement on the miserable soul of the offender. Ichigo beats her to it this time. He snaps- that voice and those tears, the way she holds her hands over her head- it's just like Hueco Mundo.

He stands and walks forcefully forward, absent-mindedly knocking desks out of his way until he is standing before the offending boy.

He reaches up high behind his back to grab his sword…

… And grasps at the empty air.

His heart gives a pang and he grinds his teeth together. "Fuck." He whispers, just before he draws back a fist to smash in the kid's face.

It's a blur, suddenly. He's not sure where he is. Orihime is still crying, somewhere, and he needs to find Rukia. He hits the teen again, forgetting why, even when he's up on top of the boy and pounding away. Red flecks his face, and he sees Ulquiorra's cero. He can feel his hollow screaming at him, demanding control, he can feel the black blood of the monster creeping into his eyes-

"Ichigo! STOP!"

A hand on his shoulder stalls him.

It is not Ishida pulling him back from overkill this time, but Tatsuki, who stares at him for a good long while in what is part understanding and part estrangement.

"That's enough." She says.

He turns back and sees the kid's out. His fists are bloody and the kid's nose is broken, not to mention the kid's lips are shredded and three front teeth are gone. He stumbles back off of the teen like he's been burned and stares.

"It's over now." Tatsuki reminds him. "It's done."

_The fight?_ He wonders. _Or the war?_

His father comes to collect him later.

"Clark Kent wouldn't jump." He say as they drive home. "He'd do a report on Superman's death and then move on with his life."

_How would you know?_ He thinks. _You gave up your life as a captain to be human. You don't understand._ Even though, really, his father probably does understand, and he knows it, too.

"He'd be Clark Kent." Isshin reaffirms.

"You're wrong."

"Oh?"

He nods, surely. "He wouldn't go on being Clark Kent." Ichigo says. "He'd be looking for Superman."

There is nothing Isshin can say to that. He knows it's true.

They get home much sooner than Ichigo had hoped. He doesn't want to be alone in the silence of his room again- even if he doesn't want to hear his father give him the 'it'll-get-better' talk anymore. He wants to just sit in the stupid car and try to detect the cigarette smoke smell left behind from his father's early days.

"Then look, son."

He jumps, startled out of his revere. "W-what?"

"Look for yourself. Just don't… don't keep jumping off of buildings. She'll be pissed at you if you die."

He thinks, for a second. "Yeah… yeah she would be."

Somewhere deep, deep inside of him, he can hear his hollow's voice, even if it does gurgle oddly like he's underwater. _She's not the only one._

-Fin-


	2. Bluebirds on the Line

Bluebirds on the Line

* * *

She watched as she pulled back from his face, blood bridged between her knuckles and his nose like crimson strands of spider's web. "Oh no." She whispered. (Orihime-centric)

* * *

People wanted all of our favorites to get a chapter like this. So, I'm going to do it! I almost didn't, but ugh, I keep writing the same stuff over and over. Like, this is seriously JUST LIKE The Nerves Girl. Less Ulquihime, I guess, but still. So I had to find somewhere to make it fit; it just can't stand alone. I DO NOT ship IchiHime; this chapter is about their friendship. Just friendship. And Orihime being fucked up. Something I'm growing way to found of as of late. Sue me.

* * *

There's this guy that follows Ishida around. One of the thugs who wanted to get at Kurosaki, but knew he couldn't, and thus went after those close to the boy. Ishida probably seemed like an easy target. He wasn't tall and imposing like Chad, and he didn't have a reputation at the dojo like Tatsuki did. He could handle himself.

But Orihime was fiercely protective. "Mama bear syndrome," Tatsuki called it. Orihime didn't think it was true. Bears were all fury and teeth and power. She was just a girl who'd somehow managed to come back from Hueco Mundo alive after three months. (_"No human has ever survived so long in this realm." Rukia told her. Orihime was sure, at the time, that she was only being nice. "You're tough as nails.")_

Ishida knows that the punk is following him- there's no way he couldn't. Orihime is aware that Ishida is only waiting for a good place to privately beat the snot out of the knife-wielding moron. Logically, she shouldn't have to worry.

The creep pulls the knife from within his pocket.

_Not this time._

The school watches with wide, horrified eyes, as Orihime calmly reaches out and wrenches a man's arm around, unflinching as he screams. When she pulls the man to the floor she throws herself at him, eyes wide and crazy as she snarls.

"Don't touch my friends."

Ishida catches her and pulls her back before she can do anything more. They both scurry away, Orihime shaking and Uryu shaken, two sides of the same coin, both pale as a sheet.

Students make a mental note to remind friends that Orihime graduated from her karate class at the same rank as Tatsuki.

* * *

The talking begin.

"I saw her changing for gym today. Her shoulders are covered in scars."

"She doesn't have any family. Sounds sketchy to me."

"No- no, Orihime has been so nice to us for years, she couldn't hurt a fly."

"I hear she broke that guy's arm."

"Yakuza."

"Wait, no, we know her-"

"Do we, though?"

"Yeah. Do we?"

Like one pluck on a string, it vibrates down the cord. With one startled cry the rumors take flight, all falling after the other. Dominos come to life. She's seen this before- displayed just outside her apartment by winged creatures on the power lines. Yeah. Just like that. Like bluebirds on the line.

* * *

Orihime, had she been an adult, probably could have gotten away from any further incidents scot-free. Teenagers, however, seem to feel the need to push. To find just how far down the deep pits go, which buttons are there- what they do. She doesn't notice the way they tiptoe around her at first, but she starts to realize pretty early on when kids start toeing the line of her comfort zones.

Someone play-punches Tatsuki in the shoulder. She stares the man down, waiting. She feels too much like a wild dog. In her mind, she can logically say that no one is capable of hurting any of her friends, but there is something about the way they wait for her to move that makes her feel like they _want_ to hurt those who are dear to her.

It's all in her head. She knows it. But she can't stop it.

Ichigo spends more time with her than ever, now that Rukia is gone. For some reason, she can't bring herself to enjoy his company. She feels the absence of his hollow, but it puts her on edge- it reminds her that it lived there. Ulquiorra used to repress his spiritual pressure around her. Reaching out with her senses, Orihime finds Ichigo feels as empty as the dead arrancar did.

He says odd things to her. He asks her if she'd noticed people's haircuts; he notices hair, now, but he can't remember faces. He asks her for tips on how to cover up bruises. He asks her how she manages to stop biting her nails until they bleed- doesn't she do that?

"Chap stick." She answers. "The taste reminds me to stop."

One day he asks her, "How would Clark Kent react if Superman died?"

It takes her a moment to realize what he's talking about, and then she has to choke back an ill-timed laugh. Ichigo really _was_ super man, wasn't he? He'd been as ridiculously over-powered, as adored, as strong and confident. And now what? He was doing news reports on the weird accidents in town for extra credit in journalism class.

She smiles. "He'd jump off a building." She says. He would. Anything to become Superman again- Clark Kent would leap from a skyscraper because even if he was empty, he'd hope there was one last drop of something- of someone in there- that would make him fly. She looks up and realizes Ichigo is staring at her in horror and reviews what she'd just said.

Ah. Suicide.

She stares at the ground, allowing her smile to slip away for a moment. No one else is looking at her. She can feel it when they do. "Not... not necessarily to kill himself. He'd do it to see if he could fly."

Ichigo gets this look in his eyes as he nods. She regrets saying anything.

Well. If he jumps from the roof next time they'd up there eating lunch, she can put him back together. She can see it now. Looking down at his hopelessly mangled body, she'd say, "I've seen worse." She'd patch him back together, one strip of blood-soaked skin at a time.

She notices his knuckles are still bandaged from a couple of week's ago- he'd gotten in a fight and she'd not been there to see it. In the old days, he'd have asked her to heal him. Now, though, there is something about her powers that clearly puts him off.

She knows why.

She was the one to resurrect his hollow, after all.

"I could try it, you know." She tells Chad. "I could try to un-do what's been done to him. I could make him powerful again."

Chad wasn't there for the fight on the dome. But he knows that Orihime's powers are a force not to be reckoned with. He shakes his head, silent for a beat, and then says, "If it's not broken, don't fix it."

Ichigo is broken; just like she is, she wants to argue. But she understands what Chad is saying. Ichigo isn't as broken as he could be. And if she attempts any resurrection of power inside of him, she could end up tearing him apart.

Again. It's nothing she hasn't done before.

* * *

She's bitter about being alone. Ishida has nightmares like she does, but he has the constant presence of his father behind his wall- a steady thrum of spiritual pressure that lets him know everything is going to be okay.

She has _nothing_. The only people who ever bothered to be there after her nightmares night and night again are dead. Both, incidentally, hollowfied- and then aided in death by her would-be-lover.

Sora and Ulquiorra were about as different as two people could have been. Still, she writes their names side-by-side on the underside of her wrist. She keeps her sleeves pulled up over her palms, never mind that its hot outside, and hopes no one notices.

At the same time, she kind of wishes they'd look. She wants to smile at anyone who asks about it and say, "They're dead." No one knows. She has to carry the burden alone. She's alone.

She burns her hand once when cooking. For a moment, she stared at her fingertips while they turned red and swelled, ring finger forming a nasty blister before her very eyes. The smell of burning eggs pulled her out of her trance as she hurried to turn off the fire on the stove.

She stares again at her blistering fingers. She has a burn scar on the tip over one ear from a time when a cero went whistling past her; just a little too close for comfort.

She reaches out and touches the hot pan again, eyes wide. It hurts. It burns.

It feels right.

* * *

It wasn't right. The burns on her hand last longer than her sudden self-destructive mood. The blisters pop when she's sweeping and she has to fight back a dizzy spell. They burn enough to make her eyes well up with tears in the hot water of the shower, and then as she's washing her hair, she actually does cry because the shampoo stings the open wounds on her hand so awfully.

Hadn't the scars taught her anything? She can't heal herself, not physically. You can't un-do what's been done. What feels right in one moment can be something that lasts far into the future, hurting more than it did in that moment.

She needs help.

"Hi, Tatsuki?" She swallows. "I need... I... I need..."

"Are you okay, Orihime?"

She takes in a deep breath. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just got distracted. I need your notes. I spaced out last lecture."

* * *

"_Who do you think you are, acting so high and mighty?! Apologize, worm, or I'll rip out your throat right here! Right now!"_

_ "L-loly, are you sure we should-"_

_ "Shut the fuck up!" She yanks harder on a fist-full of orange hair. "Apologize!"_

A hand clamps around her arm.

She doesn't hear herself scream, but she can feel it. Her heart kicks into motion so fast she can't see for a moment as she stands and then kneels like she's supposed to- like a dog in the dirt. "I'm sorry!" She puts her hands up over her head, hoping that they're not going to pull her up by her hair again- hoping they're not going to break another one of her ribs, hoping, hoping, against all hope that somehow Ulquiorra will come around for her before he's supposed to. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" She presses her head to her knees, hoping they won't see her crying, even though they can probably hear it.

She can see, suddenly. Tan knees, a grey skirt. Not white. Not Hueco Mundo. From the corner of her eye she can see desks. Ulquiorra is dead, and she's home, safe and sound.

She watches as her attacker is overwhelmed by a rage-blinded Ichigo. She can feel the hollow bubbling up from under his skin, even though it's not really happening- it's like on the dome, it's over kill- it's going to be actually kill if- if-

"I-" She forms the first syllable of his name and then gets stuck. Her throat is dry and she's dizzy. Is this real?

"Ichigo!" Tatsuki. Oh, thank god, Tatsuki. "STOP!"

She watches the blood slid down over Ichigo's cheek. She should be healing him, right? No, wait, they're... they're at school. She can't. Or can she? She forgets, do people know about her powers, or is she a fake? Or are her powers fake? Who is she, really?

"That's enough." Tatsuki says. "It's over now. It's done."

Sometimes, Orihime is alarmed to recall that she is the one they call childish. Because oh, silly, silly Tatsuki-chan. It's not over. With things they way they are, well. It may never be.

She'd once told Chad that, "One day we'll look back and realize the start of the war just never came." Now she's older, and she has no idea what she was talking about.

* * *

All of her friends- every last one from the war- has a berserk button. She just didn't realize she had one too. Maybe that's what happens when you go out knowing you might die. You grow a big shiny red button on your back that makes you turn crazy when someone pushes it.

It was during a game of basketball. Girls versus boys. The girls had won five in a row, and since Ichigo was their lead player, his 'friends' had turned on him, angry.

"Why are _girls_ beating us?!"

Ichigo scowled. "Because they're more capable than you are. They're actually working together."

"Are you saying I'm weak!?"

"I didn't say that." Hands up, Ichigo scowls. He clearly doesn't like this new kid. The boy is obviously a troublemaker. "But if you're mad because of gender, then... well, yeah. You're weak-minded at the least."

The boy had swung a punch.

Ichigo didn't even have time to block.

A feral scream echoed off the walls of the gym. Ichigo stared, untouched, where he stood. The bleachers let out a loud clang as they were smashed into. The class stares, almost in awe- mostly in horror.

Orihime has the boy by the collar. He's down on the ground, smashed back against the bleaches. She hits him in the face, holding him in place with the hand that's pulling him up by his shirt. She punches him once, twice, his nose breaks, a tooth come lose, three times, four times, he screams but she doesn't stop, pinning his flailing legs with her own as she dodges his weak attempts to push her off of him.

"Don't touch!" She screams. "Don't touch my friends! Don't touch them- don't hurt- don't- don't look at them- ARGH- stop!" She plows her fist into his stomach hard enough that he coughs, spraying her face with blood. Any second now he's going to be out, but no one can seem to move.

It's not until the boy screams a desperate, "HELP ME!" that anyone is able to move. Instantly, the class all back up, scared stiff and pale. Ichigo wakes up and moves forward.

"I-Inoue-"

She ignores him and his the boy so hard in the face that one of her knuckles loudly cracks. Broken. She doesn't seem to notice.

"Stop." Ichigo says, stronger. "Inoue- no. Orihime! Stop!"

She doesn't hear him.

"Orihime!" He grabs her underneath her armpits and hauls her to her feet, flinching as she tries to struggle away from him, back to the boy coughing up blood. She murmurs something that sounds like a release spell- like she's going to summon her fairies. On instinct he lets her go and she falls back on top of the boy slumped against the bleachers, hitting him one last time-

From the crowd of onlookers, Chad mutters a broken, "Orihime..."

She stops.

She watches as she pulls her fist back from his face, blood bridged between her knuckles and his nose like crimson strands of spider's web. "Oh no." She whispers. She looks up at the mess she's made of his skin. "Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh... oh no..." She stands and stumbles back from the boy, colliding with Ichigo. She jumps away from him as though she'd been burned.

He watches her with a sad frown. People around them are starting to unfreeze, now, so she lets him put a hand on her shoulder. Chad takes up her other side, hand on her back as he gives her a small reassuring smile.

"I want to go home now." She whispers. She's trembling.

He looks down at her- broken in the same ways she is. With his dead almost-lovers and his war scars, his breakdowns and orange hair. She's never disliked Ichigo before, but she's never actually liked him for who he truly is until this moment.

"I know." He says. And he does know. "I know."

She'll write his name on her wrist when he's gone, too. Until then, though, she'll stand in the background, waiting with him. Waiting and watching, searching for Superman.


End file.
